Page 11 of Elanie & the Empath
“You went out there?” I gaped at the twins, both still standing with their arms crossed, both glowering in matching form-fitting black shirts and tactical pants. “Without suits?”
“Rax went out,” the slightly bigger one said, shrugging.
“Morgath pulled us back in,” replied Rax, shrugging in a carbon-copy maneuver.
“Can you talk about this later?” The air around Captain Jones sparked with impatience. “After the bionic is stable?”
He’d made a good point, so I grabbed a stim from my bag, bit off the cap, and slammed it into the bionic’s slowly shrinking thigh.
After watchingthe bionic shiver and shake through thirty minutes of questioning from the captain and the twins, I’d insisted on taking him back to the med bay for proper care.
His name was Darius. He was a generation twenty-seven, worked in a high-end boutique on deck twenty-two and had absolutely no worldsly notion of how he’d ended up floating alone in the big black void.
“Is your vision returning?” I asked, holding Darius’s eyes open one at a time to squeeze a thin line of neoGen ointment under his lids.
Blinking a few times, he said, “Not yet.”
“How about your tongue?”
“It feels like I licked a circuit board.”
“Open,” I requested, trying not to wince at what I sawwhen he did. Not that he could see me, but it just seemed rude considering all he’d been through. “The radiation singed your eyes and burned the saliva off your tongue,” I told him. “You’ve got some blisters, and your taste buds might be off for a few days, but you’ll live. You really have no idea how you got out there? Were you sleepwalking?” I’d never heard of bionics experiencing episodes of sleepwalking, but their programming didn’t allow for self-harm. So he couldn’t have vented himself into space on purpose.
“I don’t remember.” His voice was thin. “It’s like the entire night has been wiped from my memory. Is that what happens when a bionic sleepwalks? Like the memories aren’t encoded at all?”
“I don’t exactly know,” I answered honestly. “Do you remember anything? Anything at all?”
Wringing his trembling hands in his lap, he said, “There might be something. I remember hearing a word. Maybe a name. Something like”—his brows pinched together—“gundon?”
“Gundon?” I repeated.
“Or maybe…Golgundon.” His shoulders inched toward his ears, his hazel eyes rising to meet mine. “No. Golgunda. It was Golgunda.”
The skin along the back of my neck prickled, like an icy wind had just blown past us. “Do you know what it means?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I’d never heard it before.” Closing his eyes for a moment, he said, “And I can’t find anything about the word on the Vnet or the Shared Bionic Network.”
“Can you run a systems scan?—”
“I already have.” Color started to return to his face. “All my systems are running optimally. I haven’t been sleepingwell, though,” he admitted. “They have me working double shifts at the store, and I’ve been wrecked.”
I reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “LunaCorp works you all too hard.” Bionics worked fifteen-hour shifts, sometimes even longer. Every single day. “It’s barbaric.”
Darius’s laughter was heavy with exhaustion. “It’s just the way it is.”
“You may be right.” I turned around to open one of my med drawers. “But it doesn’t make it okay. Here.” I handed him a metered dose inhaler. “This is SomaMist. Inhale two puffs before bed every night. It’ll help you sleep.”
Rotating the puffer in his hand, he asked, “Will this keep me from trying to walk through an airlock again?”
I gave him an encouraging smile. “Two puffs of that will keep you from noticing a herd of oorthorses stampeding across your bed.”
“Thanks, Doc. This whole thing has me pretty freaked out.”
Considering how much adrenaline still charged through my bloodstream, I could only imagine how he felt. Which, I realized, I didn’t have to. Because he told me. He was honest, open. Elanie had been honest and open too. Maybe I could treat bionics effectively even though I couldn’t read them. Maybe all I had to do was ask questions and listen.
“It would have freaked me out too.” I walked him to the door, making sure he was steady on his feet. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll check in on you in a couple of days. And please don’t hesitate to comm me if you need anything.”
Two hours later,after watching and rewatching the ship’s Vlog footage of Darius walking dead-eyed into the dockingbay, disabling the safety protocols, and stepping into the airlock, my nerves had finally faded enough to try to get some sleep before sunrise sim. But the second I closed my eyes, my VC buzzed with an incoming text message.
